Embargo to Easter Sunday 2004, London UK & Washington DC

1) History of Brand Heaven & Hell
2000 Colloquium on Global Branding @ Georgetown University: As one of the few practitioners among 40 leading academics on branding, I was assigned the talk of explaining why CEOs should take Naomi Klein’s NoLogo seriously.

What collectively I checked consensus on was:
-Global communications are a huge systemic power that like any power can be used for good or ill
-That brand valuation, and all accounting measurements of intangibles, were mathematically wrong in the sense that a boardroom could not know from these measures whether its relationship systems was compounding goodwill or badwill

What personal experiences have taught me in the 1990s as global brand architect at a big 5 management consultancy & a big 3 communications agency:
Occasionally a company is blessed with a new CEO who wants to transform the organisation to be humanly better in every way. That apart the only time I have seen big consultancy teams offer systemic brand transformation is when the client was the first to admit they had reached a heaven & hell crossroads. This is the critical junction where they can see that continuing business relationships as usual will destroy all of the company’s stakeholder integrity, and there is facilitation readiness all round the organisation to confront the crisis and conceive of a transformation of trust which could lead us back to all stakeholders' heaven.

Global Branding Colloquium Conclusion: We can deduce from the intangibles valuation crisis and what Klein shows us of the coming corporate communications responsibility crisis that auditing a global brand’s heaven/hell crossroads is the most vital communications service big corporations don’t know they need. However, as of 2000 I wouldn’t know how to launch such a service professionally – would anyone here see how?

2) Today’s status on Brand Heaven & Hell

Open Research over recent years stimulated my members of BB and Medinge has worked hard to earn the trust both of brand owners and corporate responsibility movements (eg Total Brand Corporate Responsibility Journal). At the same time we have developed the open source code for mapping whether a company’s intangibles are spinning goodwill (value growth) of badwill (value destruction). Value Multiplication can now model what will happen next from a company’s “Intangible Quality System” of relationships of productivities and demands. Meanwhile the social networks of globalisation reformers (eg be the change, simpol (Simultaneous Policy Movements), open space transformation communities) are taking on newly coordinated forms which change every global corporation’s risk of transparency spotlighting gaps between a brand’s promises and its delivery of trusts.

Expert teams invited from Medinge & BB alumni can respond to any global corporation’s request for an audit of its brand’s heaven and hell crossroads. In parallel, where responsibility issue networks ask for our assistance, we can form teams of experts who have never worked in those client sectors but have the capability to pinpoint precisely how to amplify the essence of any irresponsible brand’s illwill. Absent of a joint intervention, value multiplication’s law demonstrated conclusively by Andersen is if society ever values an organisation as zero, billions of business value times zero social value =0. Corporate strategic thinking, monopolised by accounting’s measurement rules based on the additive operand of separability, has effectively become the globally branded company’s passport to hell.

All queries about co-launch of Global Brands in Heaven & Hell welcome. Chris Macrae, uk mobile 0793 144 2446
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